[Gopnik]

(04-10-2015 08:34 PM)choichoi Wrote:  

Polish is actually a pretty fun language. With a really colorful phonetic inventory. The joy of being able to say those seemingly impossible to pronounce words like"przpraszam" or "razczochrany" is very rewarding.

I "discovered" Polish by accident when I stole a book from my old German gf who was an exchange student at my college. She was still in a relationship with a Pole, while I was givin her the chocolate stick and had purchased the book to be able to communicate with the guy's family.

I look through the book and realize it's for German speakers but this was perfect since I knew enough German to use the book - I was simultaneously reinforcing my German while learning a whole other language.

I've since stopped studying Polish and went on to learn a bit of Bulgarian, but now I'm completely obsessed with Russian! I hope to return to studying Polish and other Slavic languages soon. Poland has a a very interesting history at the dead center of Europe wedged between what once where the Prussian. Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires.

The book that I stole: Polnisch für Selbstlerneren. It's published by Langenscheidt and I think it was pretty good although I did not have the audio discs.

Knowing Russian certainly helps a lot with Polish. Even if the languages are not that similar in terms of the content, words etc (Polish has more slavic words while Russian has more English and French cognates for example) I find the grammar to be very similar. The cases seem to work in almost identical ways and I often find it useful to think of Russian equivalents of certain words (dokąd? + GEN = куда? +ACC) etc. Bulgarian I've heard, is the only slavic language that lost the case system so I'd expect it to be relatively easy.